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Emp-rah’s Eye – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Emp-Rah’s Eye

Guy Haley

Flames leapt up from the half-barrel hearth and made the pictures dance. Simple things sketched in paints of pounded oxide, crushed fungi and dribble-down by-products. In the light of the fire, they moved with a sacred, secret grace.

Daubings of Mother Rat twitched on flaking steel next to the Old Builders. The High Lord of the Spire gave silent judgement from his palace up by the world cave ceiling. Over them all was Emp-rah, the protector, depicted as a single staring eye. The figures were gods of the true people, as the ratskins called themselves.

In front of the fire, close to the gods, was a man so old that even in the heat of the deep down underhive he was swaddled in a blanket woven with the patterns of fungus, rat, cogs, spin handle and other natural things. At his side sat a young girl holding a bowl of beaten metal, deep with potent medicines. She cared for him. Age clawed at his bones and his innards. The klaxons of his life ran out. He was not long from entering the Dark Cave whence no man came again.

His name was Two Tails, and he was the story singer.

Two Tails’ leathery skin was broken by a net of shadow. When the grub-oil lamps were lit, he was hideous, with deep wrinkles in his flesh like rumpled uphive cloth. At his throat his skin hung loose. He was bald, the brown of his scalp mottled with shiny pink blotches. What little hair he had was fine as a newborn’s and as dry as a corpse’s. His eyes were white and sightless. But he was far from helpless. They said he could hear and smell as sharply as a great duct rat, and that though his limbs were wasted thin as rebar, they were perhaps as strong.

He was old. Old! No one lived to so great a tally of years, not ever, but he had. He was at least forty, maybe even – an impossibility to be whispered – fifty years old.

Five others were in the telling cave. Five braves from the clan of the Five Eyes judged worthy of the journey. Five braves for Five Eyes, that was the custom. They were young but storied already in their deeds, their wrists and necks adorned with honour jewels of rat teeth, glass fragments and threaded metal nuts.

As was the way of their kind they were totally silent, their sinewy bodies poised ready to move at the slightest threat. Yet for once their attention was not diffused through the structure of the caverns about them, rat-whisker twitching for peril, but focused, tight as a lasbeam, on the ancient man.

‘Listen,’ Two Tails said to the braves, ‘and I shall say you a story, a true tale of courage and of cunning.’ He whispered the telling, his voice a deathly croak from the Dark Cave itself, but his words… Well, his words were as sharp as plasteel ground to a killing edge. ‘Listen, and take in my wisdom. It may save your lives, in the trial to come.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘before the story, another story. Once, there was a story singer. Older even than I am now. Tuk-mar of the Shining Steel, he was called. Your grandfathers heard him sing his stories when they were babes at their mothers’ breasts. As boys your great-grandfathers heard his tales. You sit where they sat. You hear this tale from my mouth. So Tuk-mar lives, by blood’s continuation and by story, though he died thirty-five years ago. This is our way.’

Thirty-five years! Two Tails paused to let the vast span of time sink into the minds of the braves.

‘Many thousands of times did the moaning voice of the uphive wail the passing of time through Tuk-mar’s life, and many thousands more has it done so since. This is an old story, a story of power. Listen now for the secrets I shall share. You will not repeat them to others of the clan, for four of you will die, and the last, the one who returns, shall take my place here, and not say these words until his time comes, and the Dark Cave yawns its welcome to you as it yawns now at me.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Emp-rah’s Eye © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Emp-rah’s Eye, Necromunda, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-927-0

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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